By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
(Note: this is part 2 of a two part series about the interfaith out reach of the Utah monks. For part one, see Talking the Talk: The Interfaith Ideal of the Utah Trappist Monks – The Boy Monk).
In my last blog post, I described how a request (from my friend Joel Campbell, a BYU journalism professor) to talk about the ways Utah’s Trappist monks interacted with non-Catholics forced me to consider the very essence of the monks’ interfaith ideal.
I grew up at the Abbey of the Holy Trinity in Northern Utah after a painful family divorce in the 1970s. When the Huntsville monastery closed about four decades later, I wrote a memoir called Monastery Mornings to help the world remember my friends the monks.
Yet, just because I jotted down my own memories of the monks—my fellow Catholics—does not mean that I had the right words to describe their interfaith orientation. Thus, I looked for and found inspiration and guidance in the words of the monks themselves.
That inspiration, however, begged the question…did the monks just talk the talk or did they walk the walk too regarding interfaith friendship? My own memories provide the answer to that inquiry. I personally witnessed the monks’ interfaith ideal in action.
The Utah monastery was never a “Catholic Disneyland” or a religious ghetto. Instead, the sacred place attracted all sorts of visitors from all sorts of backgrounds.
Not only did the local Catholic priests do annual weeklong retreats there, so did Ogden Ministerial Association and others from many faiths. And young Latter-day Saint men were known to spend several days reflecting at the monastery before going off on their missions.
The recovery community found a home at the old abbey too. The fifth step of the twelve steps program for dealing with addiction is to “admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.” Many people of faith—and people with no faith at all—took this step at the Utah monastery.
Father Emmanuel Spillane—the monastery leader when my family first started visiting there—often talked about both Eastern and Western religious thought. In one memorable homily from the 1970s, he reminded us about Mahatma Gandhi’s admonition that more people would be Christian if more people were Christ-like.
In a 1976 lecture at Salt Lake City’s Westminster College, Father Emmanuel also said that the West had the “religions of the word” and the East had the “religions of silence.” But then he added, “The word can only be heard in silence.”
Even as a young boy, I could tell that the monks were good friends with their neighbors. The local Relief Society for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints provided support and refreshments at the abbey’s funerals and anniversaries. There is whole chapter in my Monastery Mornings book about the monks and the saints.
In addition to what I saw, several years later I also learned about many other examples of inter-religious friendship that developed in Huntsville, but it did not start in a very friendly way.
In July 1947, when the Utah abbey first got started, there was a competitive (“let’s convert them”) attitude between many religions. Thus, the monks coming to Utah were wary of the Latter-day Saints.
The saints worried that the monks’ arrival was a Catholic invasion, right in the backyard of future church President David O. McKay, who grew up in Huntsville. The town started a petition to evict the monks.
It could have been the beginning of a local religious conflict. Instead, what happened in the Ogden Valley turned into a great example of how to live out the Gospel mandate to “love your neighbor as yourself.”
The early monks developed a strong friendship with their neighbor Lou Buhrley, who was the local Latter-day Saint bishop at the time. Bishop Buhrley stood up in church one Sunday and bore his testimony that the monks were sincere men of God only trying to help people. He said, “And I’d join them too if I did not have to give up my wife and kids.”
That initial bond opened a door and facilitated many other acts of kindness, from both sides of the religious divide.
The monks helped a neighbor finance their son’s Latter-day Saint mission, mentored young dairy farmers, brought in crops for other injured or laid-up local farmers, and supplied food to help many other local residents survive tough winters. They also donated money for a new library and land for a water treatment plant for the town of Huntsville.
The saints repaired and replaced the monks’ bread-making equipment, and helped them manage their farm and irrigation operations. The Huntsville mayor—a descendant of David O. McKay—called them a “blessing to the community” during the golden anniversary of the abbey’s founding. A Latter-day Saint film maker named Steve Peterson has spent several years developing a wonderful documentary, and filming oral histories, about the monks.
As a young boy in the 1960s, Joel Campbell also spent many hours at the abbey helping his father build a modern dairy barn for the monks. The monks befriended the family. They were happy for Joel when he shared the exciting news of his Latter-day Saint baptism, and they celebrated with Joel’s brother Jeff when he got his mission call.
Today, Joel teaches his BYU students about Krister Stendahl, the former dean of the Harvard Divinity School and the Lutheran bishop of Stockholm. Stendahl asked us to leave room for “holy envy,” meaning we should recognize elements of another religion that we admire and wish reflected in our own religious tradition or faith. Joel tells his students he has holy envy for the monks.
Of course, the friendships and holy envy extended beyond the monks and the saints too.
Bede Griffiths, a monk and the leader of the Christian Ashram movement, believed meditation was the common ground between Catholicism and Hinduism. When Bede visited Holy Trinity Abbey in the 1970s, Father Emmanuel celebrated a “third eye mass” with him and all in attendance wore the bindi dot on their foreheads.
The Jewish holiday of Sukkot started as a reminder that when the Hebrew ancestors were lost in the wilderness, God provided booths for them as temporary shelter. Father David Altman from the abbey has a Jewish background.
He and a local rabbi celebrated Sukkot…the “feast of booths”…together for several years. The rabbi brought a temporary booth—portable and on wheels—to the abbey to celebrate the feast in it with Father David.
Today, a former Latter-day Saint missionary named Bill White owns the old monastery land and works to preserve the monk’s heritage and memories. Knowing the monks wanted their agricultural tradition to continue if possible, Bill hired Kenny and Jamila McFarland to run the farm operations on the abbey land.
The McFarlands are seventh generation family farmers from West Weber and are Latter-day Saints. Today, they grow wheat and barley and pumpkins on land that the monks named after Catholic saints and blest with holy water every spring. The McFarlands proudly call the place the Historic Monastery Farm.
The Utah monks talked the talk and walked the walk when it came to inter-religious friendship. I think I can summarize that talk and that walk with one word—love. The monks’ interfaith ideal was all about love.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
